Americans Pay Dearly to Maintain Israel’s Nuclear Secrets

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has
just stopped its $170 million nuclear waste
dump cleanup at a former
Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) site in Pennsylvania.
In the early 1960s, NUMEC established a plutonium facility in Parks Township — disposing
of waste in a large field adjacent to the plant. NUMEC’s waste
site was staggeringly inappropriate. According to Atomic Energy
Commission surveys and more recent USACE
studies, groundwater flows
freely throughout the dump at levels where waste resides. Further
below the surface, a warren of coal mine shafts from the early 20th
century creates the possibility of toxic seepage and sinkholes.

According to what the USACE knows,
a contractor failed
to inspect the contents
of a 55-gallon drum holding radioactive waste before moving it.
What nearby residents, contractors, and USACE engineers don’t know could
pose an even greater hazard — and the CIA
may be in a position to provide a remedy.

According to newly declassified
FBI files [.pdf], NUMEC’s
venture capitalist David Lowenthal and founder Zalman Shapiro knowingly
failed to comply with even the lax AEC standards in force in the 1960s
for handling radioactive waste at NUMEC. An FBI wiretap placed
on Lowenthal’s phone picked up shocking news of a major illicit
radioactive spill on May 5, 1969. Lowenthal and Shapiro were both
under investigation for diverting enough HEU to Israel to build more
than a dozen atomic weapons. Shapiro and Lowenthal were in the
midst of their “exit strategy” — selling NUMEC to Atlantic
Richfield, which would (along with successor Babcock & Wilcox and
then American taxpayers) be left holding the bag for massive future
cleanup and health indemnity costs.

Shapiro and Lowenthal — in line for
a $150 per share buyout of their substantial stock holdings — seemed
surreally unperturbed as the avoidable disaster unfurled, quickly moving
on to the topic of new corporate acquisition targets.

9:18 p.m.: CENSORED reported on a spillage at the plant. They have the area
roped off and it will take some pick and shovel work to dig up the contaminated
areas. CENSORED said they are getting 100,000 counts. CENSORED said, “Oh, God.”
They are dampening it down to avoid dust and will cover it if it looks
like it may rain. CENSORED asked if there is anything on AAI? …

9:20 p.m.: CENSORED said that he
heard that American Instrument Company [is] up for sale. He said
he heard this from the former sales manager.

More recently,
Geiger counter–wielding inspectors in Japan used 6,000 counts per minute as
a threshold standard for decontamination, only raising it to 100,000 after the Fukushima
disaster.

A phone call placed just two minutes
after the first about NUMEC confirmed that

it’s not only a bad spill
but “actually they are operating outside compliance.” They had
the drums all together. They have about 200 drums and estimate
that about six a day will corrode through. The trouble lay with
a fluoride which was put in to help the decay, and this was not checked. CENSORED said they
are also about $230,000 over on their construction costs for the scrap
plant. Z [Zalman Shapiro] said if they could get other people,
there would be a lot of firing.

Shapiro gained a reputation for disregarding the health
concerns of his ill-trained
workforce and firing them at will in order to suppress wages
in the economically depressed Kiski Valley. New high school graduate
hires were callously told to “drink lots of beer” to flush
radioactive contaminants out of their systems. Tellingly, both
Lowenthal and Shapiro refused to live anywhere near Apollo or Parks
Township, preferring spacious homes on the same leafy street in Pittsburgh,
all the better to host visiting Israeli nuclear weapons program officials.
Shapiro, a brilliant nuclear scientist and longtime Zionist Organization
of America leader who has been tight-lipped about NUMEC in recent years,
was nominated in 2009 by his daughter for a National
Medal of Technology and Innovation.
He is still eligible, if chosen from a pool of other talented Americans,
for a White House ceremony with President Obama in 2011.

It is too late for the USACE to interview David Lowenthal — who began his career smuggling refugees to Israel — about the location of the 1969 spill.
In 1956 Israel
began working its top agents
to procure materials obtainable only from nations with yellowcake access or billion-dollar gaseous diffusion plants.
In 1957 the undercapitalized start-up that was NUMEC — dwarfed by industry
cohorts Westinghouse and General Electric — used its connections to
winnow its way into the U.S. highly enriched uranium (HEU) stream as a
scrap reprocessor and maker of specialized fuels for naval propulsion
systems using capital raised by Lowenthal. NUMEC launched in Lowenthal’s
defunct, dirt-floored steel milling facilities in the center of a quaint
village. In retrospect, NUMEC resembles its true siblings — Materials
for Palestine, Foundry Associates, Service Airways, and later, MILCO — all thin front
companies established for
the sole purpose of stealing and illegally
smuggling U.S. arms to Israel.
Worker safety, profitability, environmental regulations, and materials
accountability all took a back seat to NUMEC’s core purpose — helping
build Israel’s clandestine atomic arsenal.

It is unlikely that Shapiro will now
step forward and tell the USACE where his fluoride-saturated illegal
drum cache is located. Out of compliance, it likely doesn’t appear
on any
topographical site maps
developed by the USACE or its contractors. The CIA, which intensively
investigated NUMEC over the diversion of weapons-grade nuclear material
into the Israeli nuclear weapons program, could drastically improve the
probability of a more successful, safer cleanup. Only the CIA
can give an accurate and overdue public estimate of how much U.S.
taxpayer–funded HEU was actually diverted from NUMEC into the Israeli
nuclear
weapons program and is therefore no longer a hazard in any
NUMEC waste site. As
recently as 2009, the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission officially listed vast quantities of missing NUMEC
material as still “unaccounted for.” The CIA may also
have overseas wiretaps or HUMINT as illuminating and suddenly relevant as the
FBI’s. As a public service, it could also release its jealously
guarded equity
content in a 1978 Government
Accounting Office report — which Congress always intended to be public — about
NUMEC that was partially declassified in 2010 and scores of other CIA
files it has bottled up in National Archives and Records Administration
holdings.

Officially, the CIA has never released
records or issued formal statements about NUMEC. But the agency’s
former employees have been much more vocal. Former CIA Tel Aviv station
chief John Hadden once described to the BBC how Rafael Eitan — the
master Israeli spy who visited
NUMEC [.pdf] undercover
in the 1960s and who later handled spy Jonathan Pollard — might have
found diverting HEU from NUMEC much lighter work than kidnapping a Nazi war criminal from the streets of Buenos Aires. “Just
imagine to yourself how much easier it would be to remove a pound or
two of this or that at any one time, as opposed to — which is inert
material — as opposed to removing all at one blow. One hundred fifty pounds
of shouting and kicking Eichmann. You see, they [the Israelis]
are pretty good at removing things.” Hadden claimed that
NUMEC was “an Israeli operation from the beginning.”

Carl
Duckett, former deputy of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and
Technology, also went on record verifying that the agency came to
the conclusion
by 1968 that “NUMEC material had been diverted by the Israelis and
used in fabricating weapons.” Reporters such as John Fialka and former
Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials Roger Mattson and Victor
Gilinsky,
who are still active in the industry, spent years trying to dislodge
the CIA’s secret trove of information sealed up in expert briefings
about NUMEC. All such Freedom of Information Act requests
have been refused, presumably to advance the tired, discredited, yet
official U.S. and Israeli policy of “ambiguity” over what the entire world knows anyway — that
Israel has built and deployed a massive nuclear arsenal through a series
of highly illegal acts.

Given this week’s events, the cost
of that unnecessary secrecy to the commonweal is going up dramatically.
The CIA’s blanket censorship about NUMEC is now contributing to an entirely
avoidable public safety hazard. CIA censorship will only compound
American taxpayer and health costs to clean up a dump that with just
a bit more warranted
law enforcement back in
the 1960s would never have existed in the first place.